Rügen
— — the white cliff above the green sea.
Not only on a wall.
“Germany's largest island, in the Baltic, joined to the mainland by a causeway at Stralsund. The chalk cliffs at Jasmund rise to 118 metres at the Königsstuhl and gave Caspar David Friedrich his most famous landscape. The seaside resorts of Binz and Sellin keep their nineteenth-century pier promenades. The old beech forest at Jasmund is a UNESCO site.
Rügen, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Rügen lies in the Baltic Sea off the north German coast, in the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, joined to the mainland by the Rügen Causeway at Stralsund. At 926 square kilometres it is the largest island in Germany. Its shape is a cluster of peninsulas around a central body, indented by lagoons known locally as Bodden. Jasmund National Park, on the northeast coast, protects the chalk cliffs and the ancient beech forest; the latter was inscribed by UNESCO in 2011 as part of the Primeval Beech Forests of the Carpathians and Other Regions of Europe.
The chalk that forms the cliffs of Jasmund was laid down in the Late Cretaceous, more than seventy million years ago, when this part of Europe sat beneath a warm shallow sea. The Königsstuhl, the most photographed pinnacle, rises 118 metres above the water. Caspar David Friedrich's 1818 oil Chalk Cliffs on Rügen helped fix the place in the German Romantic imagination; the painting now hangs in the Oskar Reinhart Collection in Winterthur. The cliffs erode by a few centimetres a year, and large blocks calve into the Baltic every winter.
The Rügen Causeway and the parallel road bridge from Stralsund are the only fixed connections to the mainland. ICE trains run direct from Berlin to Binz in about three and a half hours. The seaside resort of Binz, with its restored 1908 pier, is the main hub; Sellin and Sassnitz follow. The Königsstuhl visitor centre at Jasmund opened a glass skywalk in 2023, replacing direct foot access to the headland. May through September is the working travel season; the Baltic is too cold for swimming most of the year.